Ars compares five apps to see which ones offer the best experience to comic lovers.

Loyalty to a certain comic book series can be a hard thing to shake. I enjoy reading comic lines from DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse, even if I haven't always been pleased with the creative directions they have taken over the years. My favorite publishers have done some questionable things with their imprints, but I am still hooked on the comics-reading experience. Of course, I still expect good characters, storylines, and presentation out of these comics.

If I wanted to read series from those publishers on paper, I could walk into a comic book shop, stock up on my monthly titles, and read them in one single place. But let’s be real: I no longer read comics in print. I haven’t bought comics on paper from a shop since these three publishers started putting their comics online.

In our previous post about comics readers, we looked at apps that let you load comics from your own collection and from publishers who make DRM-free versions of their titles. But some of the largest publishers of US comics—including DC, Marvel, Image Comics, IDW Publishing, and Dark Horse—don't fall into this category. What are the easiest ways to purchase comics from these publishers, and which of these apps offer the best features in reading technology? As a follow-up to our look at DRM-free comic readers, we decided to review five apps that let you purchase and read these comics on your iPad.

We considered the ease of purchasing comics from each of the five apps. We also took into account the reader’s user experience: Besides giving you access to your purchases, do the apps’ user interfaces let you enjoy reading a comic without too much fuss? Sure, the retina screen of the iPad will render panels and covers pretty nicely, but does the app let you just sink into the story without annoyance? For each app we also listed instances where the universal app is available, for readers who may also use iPhones to read comics.

Enlarge/ ComicsPlus actually feels like visiting a comics store, because you can find dozens of imprints and genres. (It's not always about capes and tights.)

ComicsPlus, made by developer iVerse Media, tries to make things easy for comics fans when it comes to finding titles and reading them easily. It borrows heavily from Apple’s iTunes Store model and makes use of Apple's in-app purchasing system. You can search across multiple publishers and content providers, buy whatever you want, and then consume the comics inside the very app you bought them from. I thought that was pretty cool.

The app’s store is the first thing you see when you launch the app. Its moving panels slide in and out, showcasing titles like G.I. Joe, The Hypernaturals, and more. The store’s interface lets you find comics by what's featured, most recently added, and the top titles. But the best part of the store is the button on the upper left to “Browse Store.”

Here you can easily access more than five dozen different publishers in one single place, which is handy if you have loyalty to certain brands. It would be nice to be able to bookmark them, but you can scroll alphabetically pretty quickly. ComicsPlus is a great reminder that good comics don’t just come packaged in bustiers and tights. The ComicsPlus apps offers titles from dozens of imprints, and you can easily view them from your iOS device or over the Web.

Sadly, you can’t get access to Dark Horse or DC titles on this app, and the Marvel titles that are available don’t reflect the full range of what makes Marvel’s comics so compelling. However, IDW and Image can be found here, so this app could potentially fill all your needs depending on which publishers’ comics you read.

Reading a comic in ComicsPlus is about as basic as you can get. You get a progress bar that acts as an automatic bookmark, and you can use a sharing button at the top for rating the app, or sharing on Facebook and Twitter. There are no brightness controls or other reading preferences.

Platform: iPad

The Good: Great selection of all kinds of titles, including manga, horror and imprints like Image and IDW.

The Bad: You’re not going to be able to read Dark Horse or DC on this one; Marvel selections are slim.

Enlarge/ If you're loyal to certain imprints like Dark Horse, it may make sense to download their app.

I am a huge Mike Mignola fan, and if I want to read the digital versions of Hellboy, I use the Dark Horse app. Individual issues of each title can be easily purchased using Apple’s in-app purchase system, and prices are a bit lower than their print counterparts. I found most Hellboy issues priced at around $1.99.

(Dark Horse does offer a browser reader that anyone can use, regardless of device or operating system. In that sense, Dark Horse does offer a pretty good alternative for reading your Dark Horse library over the cloud. In my experience, however, the Web-based versions of comic-reading apps can be a bit clunky, depending on how the HTML is rendered. For that reason, I prefer reading comics via apps.)

Comics that run in a limited series or are part of bundles are unfortunately not available for purchase as a bundle, however. According to Dark Horse, Apple’s limitations on in-app purchases prevent this type of pricing from becoming available to users. However, you can buy bundles from Dark Horse through its website, and any purchases you have made using your account will be available on the iOS app. As such, buying directly from Dark Horse is an easy way to circumvent this issue.

The reading experience on the Dark Horse app is fairly simple. You can zoom in using a double-tap gesture, though it seems to only zoom in on a pre-set area of the screen. Zooming on individual panels is unresponsive. In-app brightness controls are a welcome feature, and you can enable panel zooming if you like, and the app will guide you through each panel. You can also tweet from inside the app.

Platform: iPad and iPhone

The Good: Access to titles like Hellboy, Emily the Strange, and Lone Wolf and Cub.

The Bad: It’s basically the only app you can use to read Dark Horse, and its user experience feels mediocre at best.

Enlarge/ Wait, I can really view my Marvel and DC purchases all in one app? In this view you can see some of my purchases, but there's more than 60 imprints to choose from in the Comics store.

comiXology originally launched as an online community for comics fans, and in 2010 the company launched its own digital comics readers for mobile devices and the Web. comiXology's iPad app, simply titled Comics, is probably the closest thing to a seamless store and reader experience a comics fan can find on the iPad.

What makes comiXology a leader in this area is the content deals it has brokered to stock the store. comiXology has landed exclusive agreements with Marvel, and it also holds the exclusive distribution for DC’s comics. You can find more than 50 other imprints in the Comics app, bringing you closer to an actual comic book shop experience. All in all, comiXology provides comics from more than 60 publishers. The Comics app is similar to the iTunes store in its ease of purchasing content from various providers.

Comics’ interface provides a fairly straightforward shopping experience and a streamlined reading experience. These interface touches have proved so successful for comiXology that it has actually licensed the app’s interface to both Marvel and DC’s own apps, which we will cover later on in this review.

The Comics app launches right away into its store, and you are greeted by various panels showing off the latest covers and promos from publishers. The app lets you view comics by series, genre, creator, or publisher. The publishers view provides some nice thumbnails of the logos of each publisher, but there is no other sorting available. This doesn’t make for a good shopping experience if you’re looking to browse for titles. However, it’s nice to see so many choices inside the app, and I have spent many hours just browsing through different imprints to find new interesting titles. You can quickly start purchasing issues using an iTunes store account. Titles begin to download immediately onto your device after purchase.

The Comics app offers a few nice cloud-syncing features for purchases. You can view your purchases, and if you happen to buy your titles from one of the publishers over the Web or using another app, you can download that title right onto your iPad. This is the feature that sold me on Comics. By combining my purchases (which are mostly from Marvel and DC), I now have access to my paid comics in the cloud. The purchased items view could use refinement, though, since it only sorts them according to purchase date. It would be nice to be able to sort by other attributes like title, creator, or even characters mentioned in each issue.

Readers who purchase titles in the Comics app also get access to them in their Web-based reader, so even if you don’t have your iPad or iPhone handy, you can still view your comics on other operating systems and hardware.

The reading experience of the Comics app is pretty standard. You can turn letterboxing on or off, turn transitions on (and control their speed), and show pages on enter and exit. However, the panel-by-panel guided view is elegant and slick. As the app guides you through the story, the letterboxing and cropping adjusts to display each panel in a high level of detail. To me this feels immersive and almost invisible, but guided viewing can be a pretty subjective thing. Playing with it is pretty easy, and you can ignore it if it doesn’t suit your reading needs.

Platform: iPad

The Good: This app gives you access to the major imprints in a single convenient spot.

25 Reader Comments

Comixology has access to IMAGE comics, which means Walking Dead, Invincible, and POWERS as well as BOOM Comics' Irredeemable and Incorruptible. Those titles alone sell the app, add in Marvel and DC and it's the only app you REALLY need for comics unless you have a very niche comic favorite.

Not that I'm an iPad user or likely to be, but what about the offline experience? Backup? How about finding other series comics in the same (ridiculously over large crossover) story arc? Since you mention the severe sorting limitations, that means you aren't going to be sorting by story arcs. How about finding holes in your collection, is that a manual task? Since Comixology can let you read Marvel and DC, does that mean if you buy through the DC app that Comixology can read the comic? In short, DRM and archiving are major worries of mine before I would consider getting back into comics after a long absence.

Not that I'm an iPad user or likely to be, but what about the offline experience? Backup? How about finding other series comics in the same (ridiculously over large crossover) story arc? Since you mention the severe sorting limitations, that means you aren't going to be sorting by story arcs. How about finding holes in your collection, is that a manual task? Since Comixology can let you read Marvel and DC, does that mean if you buy through the DC app that Comixology can read the comic? In short, DRM and archiving are major worries of mine before I would consider getting back into comics after a long absence.

With Dark Horse and the Comixology apps, you need to download comics to read them, so offline you've got access to whatever you've downloaded.

Comics lets you sort your downloaded books by title, publisher, genre, and creator; sometimes when you finish reading a book there's a link to the next issue in the story arc, but it's hit or miss and mostly miss. In Dark Horse you can find your books, downloaded or otherwise by series and genre; I haven't noticed any story arc stuff, but I mostly use Comics, so maybe I missed it.

I've bought comics in the Marvel app and they didn't show up in Comics; none of the comics I've bought in Comics or the Comixology site appear in the Marvel or DC apps.

The Marvel and DC apps can be a little handier than Comics for finding things to buy, but I tend to do my buying in Comics or on the site, to keep everything in one place.

Since you don't seem to have a tablet yet, I'll mention that there's also an Android version of Comics; not sure about the publisher-specific apps.

DC comics suck and always will excuse the rant, Comics program sounds like a good program and I will give it a try. Another program to try is Comic Zeal great program if you what to archive your comics on your computer or iPad and use iTunes at the same time transfer and sync comics between your devices.

I started buying stuff from AveComics because they added Les Humanoïdes Associés' comics especially ones by Jean Giraud/Mœbius (most of them in French), it's not cheap, but the only licensed way I've found to buy them as digital comics (heck it's getting hard to find dead tree versions in North America now).

Wish they would license the complete Blueberry which was Jean Giraud working under his pseudonym Gir doing stunning cowboy comics -- done before Sergio Leone did "The Man With No Name" trilogy.

I have the Dark Horse and the main Comixology apps on my android devices (and old Iphone 3G). Between them I have access to nearly everything. I mainly buy DC's 99 cent weekly digital releases and a few other titles. For Dark Horse, I tend to wait for bundles. They work out great.

What really makes Comixology stand out is their sales. I've picked up issues of Y: The Last Man, Irredeemable, The Boys, and The Walking Dead for $1 each, and gotten great deals on collections like The Stuff of Legend and the complete Rising Stars, too. They make it way too easy to get back into comic reading, but at the same time they make it a little more affordable.

I would like to tip you of about an app for reading casual funnies called Comic Avenue. The cool thing about the app is that it uses image analysis to segment out the panels so you can read them one at a time. It's really useful on the relatively small screen of my iPhone. It's also free: http://itunes.apple.com/app/comic-avenu ... ?ls=1&mt=8

Comics is also available for iPhone and android making it a great cross platform reader. I read all of the Hush and Walking dead series on there. There should be a download option to your PC though. A PC reader would be great for that.

I use Comics as well - prior purchases in other publishers comixology apps populate there, and Marvel also packages a code for digital versions of select print titles that work in Comics. The lack of Dark Horse is annoying (particularly because I don't care for the dark horse app), but on the whole - tough to complain.

Only thing that drives me nuts about Comixology is that they don't put comics downloaded to an iOS device in the area that gets backed up. This means every time I reinstall the OS I have to download what I haven't read, which can be hard to remember (I install the beta OS's on my iPad pretty frequently so this has been really common for me lately.)

Oh for reading PDF comics I buy (mainly Phil Foglio's Girl Genius series) I use Comics Flow. I like it better than iBooks for comic PDFs. It also supports the cbz format although I've only got one comic in that format.

My only real gripe about the apps is the nasty tendency to have to re-download every single stinking comic whenever they update the app. When you have a ton of issues, that rapidly becomes a pain in the keister.

Oh for reading PDF comics I buy (mainly Phil Foglio's Girl Genius series) I use Comics Flow. I like it better than iBooks for comic PDFs. It also supports the cbz format although I've only got one comic in that format.

Kevin

Girl Genius is amazing. I stumbled across the title a few months ago and I've become addicted. Fantastic stuff!

Hey, how come you didn't mention the comicsbooks lover app ?it works on iphone/ipad/mac and it's arguably the best app to read comics book in cbr, cbz and pdf format.And it's free (I mean, a good old shareware without any limititation besides a small watermark)

Not sure how relevant this is to US readers, but I'm in Australia and I often find that the in-app prices for Comixology (esp. collections) are a bit higher than if you buy through the website. I'm not sure if it's an Apple thing or just that their website isn't set up for regional pricing like the app is.

Digital comics (and digital books in general) suffer from the same problems as watching streaming TV shows and movies on the Internet, namely, that there is no one site/vendor you can go to for EVERY brand of comic. It sounds like Comixology is getting closer to that ideal.

So, what about Android apps for this purpose? And desktop ones, for that matter? I do realize some apps are available on multiple platforms, but haven't checked them all out. It'd be ideal if there were apps for everything that would let me purchase comics on one device, and read them everywhere, even synchronizing my collections and reading bookmarks across all devices.

Comixology has access to IMAGE comics, which means Walking Dead, Invincible, and POWERS as well as BOOM Comics' Irredeemable and Incorruptible. Those titles alone sell the app, add in Marvel and DC and it's the only app you REALLY need for comics unless you have a very niche comic favorite.

I don't put up with DRM on stuff I own. Where's the Netflix/Spotify/Gamefly for comics already? I get that they don't want to kill the local comic stores so the digital comics are released later and at no discount despite the fact that you don't have a physical copy but "getting it" =/= "putting up with it". I'll keep buying my dead tree graphic novel about once a year when the local store has their free comic book day. Bummer, you could've gotten more money out of me with a subscription.

Not that I'm an iPad user or likely to be, but what about the offline experience? Backup? How about finding other series comics in the same (ridiculously over large crossover) story arc? Since you mention the severe sorting limitations, that means you aren't going to be sorting by story arcs. How about finding holes in your collection, is that a manual task? Since Comixology can let you read Marvel and DC, does that mean if you buy through the DC app that Comixology can read the comic? In short, DRM and archiving are major worries of mine before I would consider getting back into comics after a long absence.

With Dark Horse and the Comixology apps, you need to download comics to read them, so offline you've got access to whatever you've downloaded.

Comics lets you sort your downloaded books by title, publisher, genre, and creator; sometimes when you finish reading a book there's a link to the next issue in the story arc, but it's hit or miss and mostly miss. In Dark Horse you can find your books, downloaded or otherwise by series and genre; I haven't noticed any story arc stuff, but I mostly use Comics, so maybe I missed it.

I've bought comics in the Marvel app and they didn't show up in Comics; none of the comics I've bought in Comics or the Comixology site appear in the Marvel or DC apps.

The Marvel and DC apps can be a little handier than Comics for finding things to buy, but I tend to do my buying in Comics or on the site, to keep everything in one place.

Since you don't seem to have a tablet yet, I'll mention that there's also an Android version of Comics; not sure about the publisher-specific apps.

First, Comics does have story arc. It should be listed in the section where you can sort by Author, Publisher, Title, etc in the store. Not sure if it shows this in your collection though.

Second, I had the same issue with some Marvel titled only showing up in the Marvel app. I just sent an e-mail (actually I think I used twitter) and it was resolved pretty easily. Comixology has this going for them as well: excellent customer service.

Finally, all Comixology apps are available on Android -- Marvel, DC, and the "Comics" app.

Comics that run in a limited series or are part of bundles are unfortunately not available for purchase as a bundle, however. According to Dark Horse, Apple’s limitations on in-app purchases prevent this type of pricing from becoming available to users.

I've noticed that this is true of Comixology as well. The digital equivalent of TPBs/collections are not available-- you can only buy the individual issues. Can anyone elaborate on why this is?

Comics that run in a limited series or are part of bundles are unfortunately not available for purchase as a bundle, however. According to Dark Horse, Apple’s limitations on in-app purchases prevent this type of pricing from becoming available to users.

I've noticed that this is true of Comixology as well. The digital equivalent of TPBs/collections are not available-- you can only buy the individual issues. Can anyone elaborate on why this is?

Some are available. For example, The Walking Dead and Locke and Key both have TPB/collections available. Also I think Who is Jake Ellis? was available in that format. Similarly priced to buying the individual issues but having one be free. i.e. $9.99 for a 6-issue TPB.

Cesar Torres / Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City.